Fisher Gold Bug/Teknetics G2 Forum

Just an FYI for you guys that are considering the Mars Tiger coil. They are not broad band coils that will also fit the Greek series detectors. Mars tunes their coils to work on the 19 Khz only. Greek series owners will need to specify the lower frequency coil.

Now for the question of whether or not this makes their coils perform better than the broad band coils, who knows?

Sorry for resuscitating an old thread but I wanted to share my own experience so far in case somebody is thinking about a Mars coil. I bought a Tiger coil recently from a vendor in the UK. I bought it to be used specifically on an F19. They sent me a Tiger with the F5 sticker on it. Normally that would not have bothered me in the least since most if all other DD's can be shared between both platforms and are technically the same. Most of my coils have F5 stickers on it and I have used them extensively with the F19 with great success. I asked Mars if they were completely compatible and they said yes but they also said that to obtain maximum capabilities from the F19, I should have received a specific high frequency model and to return it to the vendor. They did not specify what the difference would be. The vendor seemed completely unaware of any tweaking on the part of Mars and offered to switch to the G2 model instead. He even wrote G2, G2+ and F5 on the receipt as if there was no difference.

Since the coil will be used on my F5 at times I decided to keep it. The return would have been too much of a hassle and it seems to take forever to get here. The bottom line is if you are thinking about a Mars coil and have either a Fisher low or high frequency machine with compatible DD coils, be very specific that no substitutes will be accepted or go with NEL or Detech which to my knowledge are not tweaked either way.

I have tried the Mars Tiger on my F19 repeatedly and so far it performs well. It air tests slightly better than the Fisher 11 DD and it should as there is a definite size difference. It ground balances with no issue. It seems to ID targets the same as any Fisher coil that I have. There is no falsing, no EMI problems to speak of. Further testing will have to be done before I can give a more detailed assessment of it. I have not tried it on my F5 so far save for a quick air test and again, it performs slightly better than the 11 DD. In fact the gains are exactly the same as on the F19 on my usual specific clad, silver and copper targets.

I would really like to know how Mars tweaks the coil for high or low frequency and what benefits are to be expected but I will probably never know unless I have a coil specific for each machine and open it up which I have no intention of doing.

I have now ordered a Mars Discovery and specified "for the G2 !" , no greek series or F5 sticker on it. I'm going to put it up against my Detech Ultimate when it gets here.